Some Say Troubles Abound
by ALC Punk
Summary: PreResistance. Sam Anders is used to being an athlete, he's not used to leading a resistance movement.


Disclaimer: Not mine. Rating: 13+ Genre: Gen.  
Notes: Well, I was bitching about the lack of Anders-alone-without-Kara fic. 

**Some Say Troubles Abound**  
by ALC Punk!

It's almost too dark to see the differentiation in trees and open space, but Samuel manages as he slips through the under-growth. In the months since the attack, he's grown good at this. When he was five, he used to run around playing secret agent with his best friend. Dayna would kick his ass at it, and then he'd call her a girl and she'd hit him, and in the resulting mud fight they'd make up and go give Willy down the street mud pies.

Good times.

Dayna was dead, of course.

He hadn't seen her in years--not since they were eleven and she moved to Picon with her family. Last he'd heard of her, she'd settled down to run a shipping company and raise the boss's kids.

Still, thinking of the past and the lack of a future makes him wish for the days when the worst enemy you had was the kid in the grade above you who tried to steal your lunch money. When he could go home and know his parents were there, and his sister was alive (despite being the most obnoxious, tagalong, get him into trouble brat ever).

That was then.

Now he has dark skies and overcast days filled with over-bright light that eats away at his cellular biology. And he loses people.

Half of them gone too fast, on a raid that should have gone like clockwork and didn't--the Cylons were more organized. More machine-like and logical. And they didn't have to worry about attrition. There were hundreds of them, each willing to die, because then they'd just come back again. Stronger, angrier, better able to destroy all of humanity. Their God loved them.

He'd gone over the options before, but he considers them again. They could stop raiding. If he were lucky, his people would last another couple months. Then what? Picked off one-by-one, or dying from the slow poison in the atmosphere?

Better to go out with a bang, to walk into a Cylon encampment and take some of them with you.

Better to continue as he is, trying to hack out a living on a planet where the air is death, and the ground ain't much better.

So, really, no options. They just keep raiding, keep losing people, and hope for the best. There's never going to be a rescue. There would have been something by now--some sign that the Cylons hadn't eradicated all of the colonial fleet. Given the two skin jobs they've seen with colonial uniforms, he doubts many battlestars survived being frakked with internally.

Not that he has any call to be derisive. His people don't survive, either.

It's his fault. Here, in the dark, without Sue-Shaun watching him with her too-knowing gaze, he can do this. He can blame himself like he should. He led them, he frakked it up, he got them killed. Without his stupid plan they'd still be alive.

Gun in his hand, he can consider the ooptions. They could have fled into the mountains again. They could have stayed there, stayed alive.

But then what? The other survivors, the ones they'd found as they worked their way across Caprica, what about them?

Would they be dead? Without someone to organize them, someone who could lead them and give them a purpose they might simply have wandered until the Cylons and the radiation finished them off.

For a moment, he's frightened by the confidence he has in himself. Bravado, based on nothing more than a frakking ballgame. He's so sure he's right.

But then, he has to be, or this has all been for nothing. They should walk to the nearest Cylons and ask to be killed.

His publicist used to tell him that public persona was 99.9 fake.

But then, he'd fired his publicist the week after the Bucs lost their third game in a row.

Movement pulls him from his thoughts, and he can tell just from the sound of the air moving through lips, teeth and lungs that it's safe. The gun stays low.

"Bein' an idiot."

Sue-Shaun never was one to skirt around the issue. He shrugs, doesn't care that she can't see it.

A finger pokes him in the shoulder. "We'd all be dead if we'd given up. They'd be dead."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." The finger pokes him again, "We ain't frakkin' soldiers, Samuel. We ain't got no trainin', and they're organized. So quit hittin' yourself over the head."

Right. Well, she isn't. But neither is he. And in this little war, it doesn't really matter who's right, in the end. Just who survives.

She takes his silence for consent and pokes him again. "My watch."

It was, but he'd needed to think.

Samuel carefully moves past her, then pauses and touches her shoulder once. For just a moment, he can see them all laughing. Daylight spilling around them, even with the clouds overhead spilling water. It was a rain-day, but they'd played anyway, on a hard-packed dirt surface, and before ten minutes were up the field had been filled with mud. No mud pies, but plenty of mud under jerseys and in faces. He'd scrubbed his nails for five minutes before they were completely clean. Sue-Shaun had bitched for days about cleaning the mud from her hair, and the others had complained almost as loudly. Not to mention the lice they'd suddenly all had. Now the memory wasn't quite so pleasant.

A hand smacks him in the side. "Sleep, idiot."

"Night."

Making his way back in the dark, he wonders if the change from crappy pyramid team to commandoes was for the better or the worse. There's no endorsements, no ass-kissing, and very few groupie flings. Not that he had those often, but they'd happened. Now, the women he sees are soldiers, commodities to be used in this resistance.

There's no fluffy, hotel-room comforter to curl under. But he thinks, that maybe the mossy surface and threadbare sleeping bag are more honest.

-f-


End file.
